Outcast

by Aaron Allston

  Mirax Horn, piloting a speeder she had stolen mere minutes before from the parking rails outside Kallad’s Dream Vacation Hostel, circled a kilometer out from Armand Isard Correctional Facility, catching occasional glimpses of the flashing lights of official vehicles at the scene, of the crater that dominated the little ground-level plaza in front of the prison.

  Winter hadn’t told her much. It was imperative that she help the Jedi; check. It was related to her son’s condition; check. It was very important that she not be identified; not just a check, but a guideline she’d followed since she was a teenager. She needed to get near and stand by; check. All of this was second nature to her. Though she largely operated on the proper side of the law these days, she was a felon’s daughter, a smuggler and rebel herself. She knew how to acquire matériel when she needed it, how not to leave forensic or visual evidence. She was happy to do it, too, when she knew why.

  “Credcoin, this is Slicer. Do you read?”

  Mirax’s new call-sign was Credcoin; she frowned at that, wondering if Winter thought she was all about money. The woman had practically raised the three Solo children—she must know how positively frantic Mirax was feeling about Valin, both his illness, if that’s what it was, and his horrific imprisonment.

  And who was Slicer? The voice, possibly female, was distorted. Mirax raised her comlink. “Slicer, Credcoin. Go.”

  “Our target is probably coming out of a workers’ access hole right in front of the prison. It is imperative, I say again imperative, that we grab him.”

  “Understood.” Mirax angled over to line up on the throughway leading straight to the crater. From this direction, she’d have to come in over the prison, a distinctly illegal approach, and make a steep dive down to surface level. “How do I grab him?”

  “No idea. Maybe just harass him. He’s armed and very, very dangerous.”

  “Oh, good. Who’s my backup?”

  “All of us, when we get there.”

  “Who’s my backup right now?”

  “No one.”

  Mirax shut up. She didn’t want to ask more questions that yielded bad answers.

  An Alliance Security vehicle rose into her path, broadcasting on all channels for civilian traffic to turn away from this zone. Mirax dipped her speeder and flashed by under it so close that she instinctively ducked. She was pretty sure the pilot got a good look at her, which was another thing that would let him know something wasn’t right; she was wearing a sheet of transparisteel foil wrapped around her face, concealing everything but eyes and nose, visually distorting her features.

  She was over the prison now. Spotlights, rising to illuminate her, almost blinded her. She could distinctly hear the alarms sounding within the structure. She put the speeder into a dive.

  There was the crater, looking much like an asteroid-impact site, surrounded by official vehicles. Men and women on the ground were now mostly looking up at her. There was no sign of—

  No, there he was, a tousle-haired man in a gray worker’s jumpsuit, a blaster rifle in his hands, climbing unnoticed from an access hole. Mirax nodded. Her target was in sight. Now how to get him was the question.

  Best tactic for the moment: buzz him, force him to flee, keep him moving until her backups arrived. And she’d try not to get shot in the meantime.

  Leveling off just above the surface, ignoring the new spotlights being trained on her from several Alliance Security vehicles, she aimed for her target—and then her head banged against the viewport to her left as she was sideswiped from that side. Startled, suddenly dizzy, she angled off to her right, straight toward a government office building, most of its viewports dark.

  She vectored hard and found herself roaring along the face of the building at a right angle to the ground, her repulsors barely keeping her from scraping along the building front; their force blew several viewports completely in. Then she was angling away from the building face and leveling off once more, rubbing her temple.

  She shook her head and sent the speeder into a tight loop, heading back toward her target. What had happened?

  Running toward the security cordon around the prison, now packed with pedestrians and press, Jaina saw the whole event unfold. The big civilian speeder, a garish red so unlikely for a covert operations vehicle, roared toward Seff, who was now out of the access hole. But there was another vehicle, a small, speedy flatbed cargo hauler approaching from the red speeder’s port side. The pilot was visible through the front windscreen: Zilaash Kuh, the bounty hunter. Jaina swore to herself.

  The cargo hauler sideswiped the speeder, knocking it off course. The hauler continued its sideslip so that it would pass over and to one side of Seff Hellin. The Quarren, Dhidal Nyz, leaned over the side of the hauler’s bed with his oversized weapon and fired at Seff.

  Seff sprang to one side with the speed of an experienced Jedi, but the net expanded too wide for him. It wrapped around him as it had Jaina days before. As its connecting cable went taut, the Quarren was nearly pulled over the rail, but he was braced for the impact. Seff was yanked off his feet and hauled into the air behind the vehicle.

  Jaina grimaced. Seff would be experiencing the same shocks she had. She decided she intensely disliked that Quarren.

  But the cargo hauler came on straight toward her.

  The red speeder was getting turned around. Jaina brought out her lightsaber and thumbed on her comlink. “Credcoin, Slicer here. Your package is in the net. Follow the package.”

  “Understood.” Even distorted, Mirax’s voice sounded irritated.

  As the cargo hauler passed, not quite overhead, Jaina ignited her lightsaber and hurled it, giving it direction and velocity through the Force. Its brilliant blade intersected the metal cable, shearing through it. Jaina positioned herself underneath her plummeting weapon but transferred her telekinetic effort to Seff, slowing his descent.

  Slowing his descent some. She didn’t know how incapacitated he was by the net-weapon’s electrical charges. She let him hit the permacrete fairly hard, and could hear a loud grunt from him as he landed. The cargo hauler sped on, Dhidal Nyz staring down at the two of them in surprise; then the Quarren turned and began hammering on the back of the pilot’s compartment.

  Jaina caught her lightsaber, switched it off, and raced to stand beside Seff, stepping on and crushing the net’s power pack as she did so.

  Dazed, Seff looked up at her. “Oh, not you, too.”

  “Sorry.” She hammered the side of his head with the lightsaber hilt, a crude, inelegant blow. But it had its intended effect. Seff slumped.

  Mirax’s speeder settled beside her. Using the Force to augment her strength, Jaina lifted Seff and tossed him into the backseat, then leapt in beside him.

  Less than a hundred meters away, official vehicles around the crater were lifting off, turning in their direction. Jaina looked at Mirax. “Is this thing fast?”

  “I only steal the best.”

  “Go, go.”

  They accelerated away from the scene.

  The security officer, standing beside her speeder, watched four of her fellows’ vehicles take off in pursuit of the red speeder. But she must have felt some presentiment of danger. She turned, grabbing for her blaster pistol, just as Tahiri’s open-palm strike connected with her chin, bypassing her helmet entirely. The trooper slammed back into the side of her speeder, then slumped to the ground.

  Behind Tahiri, Jag, with Winter over his shoulder, ducked so the speeder would help conceal him from the gaze of the other security officers, but they were all looking after the fleeing speeder. Over the sound of the alarm and sirens of arriving vehicles, none had heard Tahiri’s attack. “I’ll drive,” Jag said.

  “I’ll drive,” Tahiri snapped, sliding into the pilot’s seat. “You’re about as maneuverable as a nerf in a child seat with all that on. I doubt you can handle the controls.”

  “I’ve flown a starfighter in this.” Jag opened the back hatch and carefully slid Winter in, then followed. “Go�
��”

  She had the speeder off the ground before he finished his word, and turned on the lights and siren as she joined the chase. Jag managed to get his hatch shut.

  Mirax glanced at Jaina. “You’re Slicer?”

  “What else would the Sword of the Jedi do but slice?” Jaina gestured at the bounty hunters’ vehicle, which had gotten turned around and was headed their way. “Don’t give them a clear line of fire at you. There’s no telling what the Quarren’s weapon can do.”

  “Right.” Whether that was a confirmation or an indication of direction, Jaina didn’t know, but Mirax abruptly vectored rightward, down a narrow accessway normally used by waste haulers and maintenance workers. It was a surface-level tunnel, opening to the sky each time it came to a thoroughfare. The violence of the maneuver threw Jaina across Seff’s body and against the hatch on the left side. Seff remained unconscious.

  Five security speeders and the bounty hunters’ vehicle followed, the bounty hunters third in line.

  “Running out of time.” There was a shrill edge to Tahiri’s words. “As soon as they get more pursuit on Jaina, this becomes a chase we can’t win.”

  “Hoth is still out. And now we have to yank this vehicle’s recorder. Since you’re using real names.”

  “Right, sorry. If I can get you to the cargo hauler, can you disable it?”

  Jag straightened up from looking at Winter. He stared over Tahiri’s shoulder. They were now halfway along the accessway and accelerating. Their speeder was last in line, and it did not appear that any of the security troopers in the pursuit had realized that the last security vehicle was occupied by hostiles. “I lost my blaster. I have some knockout grenades—no, wait. Get me within reach of the underside.” That was an insane thing to expect of an ordinary pilot, but Jedi tended to be no more ordinary than Jag himself.

  Tahiri nodded and accelerated. She passed beneath the fourth security speeder so close to the surface that Jag could feel the repulsors pushing off from permacrete below; he could see debris at road level being kicked in all directions by their thrust wash. The next speeder forward was too low for such a maneuver, so Tahiri climbed, her vehicle’s aft grazing the nose of the speeder she’d just passed. She went as high as the tunnel ceiling would allow, climbing over the speeder in front of her.

  The unexpected repulsor wash kicked that speeder downward and to the left. Jag heard it scrape along the tunnel wall, and then it was behind them, rolling at surface level, sending out showers of sparks. He winced, hoping that the security troopers inside, innocent of wrongdoing in this mess, would be all right.

  The bounty hunters’ vehicle was directly ahead now, and the Quarren in the bed only had eyes for Mirax’s speeder. Tahiri dipped again, moving up directly beneath the hauler, rising as close to it as she could against its repulsor thrust.

  Jag slapped down his helmet’s face shield, lowered the transparisteel in his viewport, and reached up for the speeder’s underside. Repulsor thrust hammered at his arm, forcing it down. He could overcome that pressure, but still couldn’t reach the vehicle’s underside; it was centimeters out of his reach.

  Cursing, he opened his hatch. Gripping the speeder’s roof with one crushgaunt, he half stood, his knees straining as the repulsor thrust from above shoved him down.

  There was a sudden flash of light as they and the other vehicles of the caravan crossed a thoroughfare, exposing them momentarily to sky and lights from traffic. Then they were in the next tunnel.

  Jag got his left crushgaunt on machinery in the hauler’s underbelly. He exerted himself, and the strength-augmenting servos in the gauntlet squeezed the repulsor nozzles out of recognizable shape. Next he grabbed a maneuvering thruster vent, destroying it similarly, and then there was the auxiliary energy cell—

  That actually exploded as he squeezed it, a minor detonation that pelted him with little shards of metal. He felt stings in his neck and upper arms. Then smoke billowed from the area he’d damaged.

  The cargo hauler slowed, dropping behind Tahiri’s speeder. Jag saw the Kuh woman staring at her control console and pounding on the yoke; then she looked up and caught sight of him.

  Had he been another man, he would have offered her some flippant gesture, but he was Jagged Fel, known among pilots and Jedi everywhere as the most humorless—

  Come to think of it, he wasn’t Jag Fel right now. He was a mystery man, and needed for his role in this affair never to be associated with Jag Fel. So he blew a kiss to Zilaash Kuh before resuming his seat and slamming the hatch shut. Kuh’s vehicle dropped farther behind until it was lost in the distance.

  Mirax had to shout for Jaina to hear her. “Two pursuers down.”

  “The next to last one is ours,” Jaina shouted back. “Tahiri and Jag are in it.” She got back to work, bringing out the sedative pack that all the Darkmeld conspirators on this mission were carrying. She injected Seff with its contents. This was slow work; Mirax’s aerobatics with the speeder made even the simplest medical procedure next to impossible.

  Finally it was done. Making sure her garment hood was up, concealing her features, she turned away from Seff and back toward the pursuers.

  Even for an experienced Jedi Knight, it took concentration to lift a speeder telekinetically, especially when its rapid movements made it a difficult target. But she found it, grasped it, and shoved it sideways—gently but irresistibly. Its right side ground into the tunnel wall, abrading the metal there, filling the vehicle’s main compartment with sparks and smoke. Suddenly the pilot was decelerating, descending, in a frantic effort to retain control of his vehicle.

  She did the same with the next vehicle, and then, as Tahiri closed, with the last vehicle in the caravan.

  Suddenly there was no enemy pursuit. Tahiri switched her lights and siren off.

  Jaina, more familiar with Coruscant than most of the others, navigated, guiding Mirax to a shadowy nook off a major thoroughfare. The two speeders settled there in the darkness.

  Jag took a moment to yank the security speeder’s recording device and crush it beyond any possible retrieval of data. Then the five conspirators gathered. Winter, though groggy, her reflexes shot, was at least awake again.

  “All right.” Jaina looked at each of the others—confused but resolute Mirax, sweaty but confident Jag, relieved Tahiri, pale but smiling Winter. “We’re almost done. Mirax, you’ll come with me. We need to steal another speeder, then pick up the rest. Then you’ll drop me on a specific rooftop not far from where all that mess took place. Jag, do you need to get back to the Imperial Remnant embassy?”

  “Galactic Empire. And yes.”

  “All right. Drop Jag off near there. Then, Tahiri, I need you to guide Mirax to the Masters’ speeder hangar access at the Temple. Tekli will get you in.”

  While Jaina and Mirax were gone, Winter removed forensic evidence from the security speeder and Mirax’s stolen red vehicle. Jag pulled off all his armor, dressing once more in the now ridiculously large black tunic. After Jaina and Mirax returned with the new acquisition, a sturdy yellow hard-top speeder with enough room for two adults, eight younglings, and a Wookiee, Jag stored his armor in its cargo compartment, along with the Quarren’s net and incriminating items of clothing. Stripped of armor, he once again became a well-muscled man of normal size.

  Jaina gave him one last, worried look. “Not too many non-Mandos have beskar breastplates and crushgaunts. The fact that you do isn’t well known, but—”

  He put a finger on her lips to shush her. “There’s nothing to worry about. I have an alibi. Like all sensible Heads of State, I have a double, hard at work pretending to be me back in my quarters.”

  She moved his finger aside. “My mother didn’t use a double.”

  “Well, she was clearly crazy.”

  That drew a short laugh from Winter. The others looked at her.

  Winter indicated herself, Jaina, and Jag. “That sounds like a toast for all our families. Here’s to crazy women, and the pilots who pursue
them.”

  Jag raised an imaginary glass in her direction.

  CAVERNS OF THE HIDDEN ONE, DORIN

  Ben wasn’t glassy-eyed, but he wanted to be. Hours of using pickaxes to hack away at living rock had tired and infuriated him. In theory, he and Luke were doing this to carve out their permanent quarters in the residential gallery, a process that would take years; in truth, Ben knew they wouldn’t be here anywhere near that long, which meant that every blow with the pickax was a wasted one.

  But now, work done for the day, after a sanisteam, dressed in fresh clothes—even if they were the horribly dull robes worn by everyone in these caverns—Ben felt a little better as he and his father walked to their audience with the Hidden One.

  Ben glanced at his father. “So, what’s your strategy?”

  Luke frowned, puzzled. “Strategy?”

  “To convince him to let us out of this hole.”

  “Ben, what’s our objective here?”

  “To get out!”

  “The objective that brought us to Dorin in the first place.”

  “Oh. To find out about Jacen.”

  “If we were to march in there and demand our release, and he agreed and somehow magically transported us to the surface, we would have failed in achieving that objective.”

  “Well, yeah. Ultimately it’s the more important one.”

  “Ultimately, yes. But since we’re under no time pressure, let’s handle things in a logical order.”

  Ben let out a sigh.

  They left the main corridor and entered the communal dining hall, which was all but empty at this midpoint hour between afternoon and evening servings. It was not that large a chamber; there were fewer than fifty Kel Dors in these caverns, and the hall could accommodate all of them. Tables and benches meticulously cut out of stone and sanded into straight, clean lines were arrayed in neat ranks for the diners, flanked by matched stone benches.

  The Hidden One sat alone at the nearest table. He nodded at the Skywalkers as they entered.